The populist Spanish Podemos party is the subject of Angel Rivero’s contribution. His analysis eyes the phenomenon from different angles by reflecting on the party’s role as a new and disruptive actor within the Spanish radical left, giving insights in its (main) political project, aimed at overcoming the so-called “regime of 1978”, and finally conducting a sociological case study unveiling a generation clash between the protagonists of anti-Franco struggles and their offspring. According to Rivero, rather than the effects of the financial and economic crises that hit Spain from 2008 on, it was a wider European context of rising economic, social, and cultural insecurity that explains Podemos’ initial successes at the ballot boxes. While the Podemos leadership discarded socialism as an ultimate goal from its believe system, the fight against the Spanish democracy in its current liberal form is on.
During the conference, the Spanish and German student participants worked in small gropus on research papers, addressing problems related to the rise of populism in one of the two countries. While German students addressed issues like the 15-M movement as well as its relation with the Podemos party and discussed wheter the latter was already an established actor in the Spanish party system, the Spanish group concentrated on the AfD as the firstly genuine post 1945 populist outfit in German politics. The results were presented and discussed during the Madrid workshop. The final papers are now puplished in this book.
We are thankful to all students for their participation, as well as to the involved academic and administrative staff at both Technische Universität Chemnitz and Unversidad Francisco de Vitoria Madrid that made the event a success. We would also like to thank the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for granting the funding that made the conference as well as the workshop possible in the first place. We are convinced that the academic event in Madrid has laid the foundation for a fruitful future cooperation between our institutions.
SPAIN’S “SECOND TRANSITION”: PATTERNS OF STABILITY AND CHANGE IN THE SPANISH DEMOCRACY 2008-2017
Adriaan Ph. V. Kühn
1. INTRODUCTION
Calls for a “Second Transition” have been ubiquitous in both the political and media debate in present-day Spain. Against the backdrop of an economic crisis, sky-high unemployment and citizens’ trust in political institutions at rock bottom, the Spanish democracy indeed has faced severe challenges on several fronts.
Amidst growing civic disdain for an allegedly unaccountable political class, fueled by corruption scandals affecting virtually all major political parties, together with the subsequent rise of the leftist Podemos party in the 2014 European and 2015 regional elections, many expected – sooner rather than later – the established party system to collapse. Others claimed that the winds of change would not stop blowing just at the steps of parliament. From their perspective, even the wider power arrangements put in place by Spain’s transición – the process of democratic reform after dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975 – were challenged by a “growing critique of the imbalances in our model of economic growth, the problems of social development, the limits of democracy, dysfunctional institutions and the State of Autonomies’ asymmetries” (Sánchez Estévez, 2015, p. 3421). The latter issue made the front pages in October 2017, when the regional government of Catalonia tested its counterpart in Madrid with an independence referendum that the Spanish constitutional court had declared illegal. The effects of the (economic) crisis, so it seemed, even put Spain’s territorial integrity at stake. Labor relations proved to be tense as well: In 2012, and for the first time in the history of the parliamentary monarchy, Spain’s trade unions called for two general strikes within only six months to protest the austerity measures imposed by the government.
In the same year, the country’s youth, labelled “the lost generation” by the media due to a 50 percent unemployment rate for those under the age of 30, voiced their discontent through a week-long occupation of one of Madrid’s central squares, demanding a “true democracy” (democracia real ya). Increasingly more Spaniards joined the young people in voicing their discontent with the status quo. While in an opinion poll conducted in 2006 36 per cent of those interviewed declared themselves to be “happy” or “very happy” with the way democracy worked in their country, in 2012 this number had dropped to 22 per cent (CIS, 2016).
However, it appeared that the final blow to the “regime of 1978”, as some detractors call the Spanish democracy’s current configuration, came in June 2014. King Juan Carlos I, one of the transition’s main protagonists (Powell, 1995, p. 151), abdicated in favor of his son Felipe. Juan Carlos, who is considered to have played a crucial part in the crackdown of a putsch staged by officers from the armed forces and the Guardia Civil in 1981, came under the pressure of public opinion when details about a hunting trip to Botswana were leaked to the press. The monarchy’s public image, one of the country’s few non-partisan institutions, had already suffered heavily from corruption allegations against Juan Carlos’ son-in-law, Iñaki Udagarin.
Yet three years on from his father’s abdication, the new head of state Felipe I has managed to regain citizens’ trust in the monarchy, partly by expelling his sister from the royal family’s inner circle and putting the crown’s allowances to public audit. In politics, continuity prevails over change as well; at least regarding the inhabitant of the Moncloa palace, the official residence of Spain’s prime ministers. Despite allegations of illegal party financing, a painfully slow recovery rate for the economy and consequently low approval ratings, the conservative PM Mariano Rajoy withstood a ten-month political stalemate after national elections in December 2015 had produced a hung parliament. He maintained office after calling fresh elections in June 2016; albeit as the head of a minority government.
Supporters of an imminent and deep change in Spain’s institutions, a “Second Transition” breaking with the fundaments the original one set, may have cause for disappointment, but anyone who today demands that the institutional arrangements of Spanish democracy be rearranged no longer holds a minority opinion. The economic crisis revealed a real crisis in the political system.
This article aims at exploring the patterns of stability and change in Spain’s institutional settings during the years of economic crisis until 2017. By “institutional settings”, I mean the party system and the structure of party competition, and the reform (or non-reform) of institutions that require consent from political actors. As an analytical tool to assess the degree of change I will use the term “Second Transition” as used in the current academic, political and media discourses in Spain. That may appear counter-intuitive, as the term itself is multi-faceted and thus lacks conceptual coherence; however, in the following section I will try to decode the term’s diverse meanings.
2. TRANSITION AND “SECOND TRANSITION” DISCOURSE IN SPAIN
Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy had long been considered an exemplary case for overcoming authoritarian rule, both within its borders and in the international scientific community (Tusell, Lamo, and Pardo 1996; Ortiz Heras, 2004, pp. 223-242). For a country that had lacked institutional stability during the greater part of the 20th century, its result is regarded as exceptional. There are no doubts that the consensus-orientated attitudes of political elites, even on the fringes of the political spectrum, were key to overcoming the historic cleavages that led to the outbreak of the civil war (1936-1939), and which were only superficially domesticized during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Representatives of the old regime and members of the (exiled) democratic opposition managed to agree on an amnesty law, a series of socio-economic pacts (pactos de Moncloa) and – above all – the democratic constitution of 1978, still in place today. This achievement, unlikely when considering the profound ideological differences between the actors involved, was made possible thanks to explicitly excluding debates or references to the country’s past turmoil.
As Spain had lacked any previous uncontested